Research Abstract
Dr. Liu's computational translational lab works at the interface of clinical oncology and molecular and computational biology to study clinical tumor evolution and drivers of disease progression, metastasis, and therapy resistance. Recent published work includes development of parsimonious predictive models of response to PD1 immune checkpoint blockade using modern techniques from machine learning integrated with clinical and biological knowledge and applicable to individual patients. A second recent study deeply elucidates tumor and immune evolution in a melanoma patient with exceptional response to immunotherapy from his initial primary tumor, metastatic progression samples, on treatment samples, early resistance tumors, and ultimately fatal disease integrating multi-modal (genomic, transcriptomic, and protein) data. A third area of interest is the drivers of clinical metastatic organotropism, utilizing matched clinical and genomic data from large cohorts of patients and electronic health records to model the longitudinal patterns of metastasis within patients and genomic drivers.
